I discovered the plastic innards of our coffee grinder are cracked, and the tube that passes the beans onto the burrs is now in two pieces. Amazingly, this inexpensive Cuisinart grinder still actually works in spite of this, continuing to show a surprising will to live after taking beatings to get it to grind beans, which has lead to it needing a weight sitting on it to work. For a long time I was looking for an excuse to replace this with something a bit spiffier, but it's been cranking along for over four years, which is longer than the cool KitchenAid grinder it replaced lived, so I'm starting to take it as a point of pride to keep it running and want to repair it and give it one more lease on life. And yes, it's crossed my mind that it's sad that four years seems like a great lifespan for one of these electric grinders, as I bet there are manual hand-crank grinders out there that are still operating fine after 100 years.

Creston wrote on Oct 1, 2012, 17:31:Manufacturers realized that if they built something to last, it would last, and people would never buy new. If instead they'd build something that would die in a few years, people would go buy new.

Sure, there's some truth to the planned obsolescence thing. Printers and light bulbs are a great example of that. On the other hand there is a lot of stuff that is simply far more complex and prone to wear/tear, especially considering our reliance on miniature electronics in almost every facet of our lives.

For the past 50 years, companies have been basing their business model around planned obsolescence. If they were to all suddenly make goods that lasted a lifetime now, our economy would literally collapse. It's a such a crazy, inter-connected chain with roots everywhere from the US to China that there is no going back. It will have to be forced by lack of natural resources to continue production as these rates.